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BevSpot Industry Profiles: TJ Zlotnitsky

BevSpot Industry Profiles offer a quick glimpse into the life and insight of various food, beverage and direct store delivery industry leaders. This summer, BevSpot Industry Profiles TJ Zlotnitsky who is the President and Co-CEO of iControl, which works with retailers to improve direct store delivery transparency and collaboration with their vendors.

BevSpot Industry: Tell us about yourself, iControl, and your role within the company.

TJ: My brother Sean and I were both born in Israel and came to the United States when I was 12 years old in 1986. I then grew up in Maryland, where I also went to college. My brother and I started iControl after our family’s wholesale distribution business was sold in 2008.

We learned a ton in that business about workflow inefficiencies and points of conflicts between food and beverage retailers and their distributors, and we felt that we could bring technology to the market that substantially simplified and improved process and outcomes for both trading partners. Read More

BevSpot Industry:In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges facing the industry today?

TJ: In my opinion, the greatest challenge the food and beverage industry is facing today is catering to consumers—especially those from the X and Y generations, who increasingly expect optimal convenience, choice, and flexibility, yet have been conditioned to believe that great value doesn’t always mean having to pay a premium price. Read More

BevSpot Industry:In your opinion, what are the greatest opportunities for the industry in the future?

TJ: I am actually very bullish on the food and beverage industry figuring out how to leverage physical presence within communities to “out-Amazon” macro-competitors, whether it’s Amazon itself or some other behemoth. Food and beverage could prove the exception to the macro-digitalization of commerce, in that physical proximity to the end consumercan and should bea sustainable competitive advantage for local operators.Read More

BevSpot Industry: What role do you think technology plays in taking on those challenges?

TJ: Technology is theonly wayto meet and overcome these challenges. To me, successful food and beverage retailing today requires a level of precision that is akin to laser surgery. The margin for error is so small that just doing it the old way is a guaranteed way to fail.

BevSpot Industry:What role does quantifiable data play in your decision making process?

TJ: Quantifiable data plays a critical role in my decision making, but I think it’s important to not ignore other variables. Data and technology are fantastic, and they are essential, and anyone not embracing both would be nuts. But at the end of the day, I try to use data to inform my decisions, not to entirely substitute for my judgement. Read More

BevSpot Industry:How do companies like iControl help the industry move forward?

TJ: iControl is a unique company, in that we focus our solutions on solving the workflow challenges of the direct-to-store supply chain, such as alcohol distribution to a typical restaurant, or bread or dairy delivery to a typical grocery store. The direct store delivery (DSD) supply chain is massive in size and incredibly disaggregated, with numerous systems of record and a high degree of complexity around data synchronization and automation ofB2Bfinancial transactions.

iControl provides our customers with both a toolset to streamline workflows with theirDSDtrading partners, as well as robust analytics to assess performance in as near to real time as possible in order to identify both net positive and net negative contributors to outcomes, and rapidly adjust behavior.